Douglas Carswell's Blog

Continuity Brown has failed to fix this mess

“In Britain ... policy seems to have been directed more at treating the symptoms of the disease than its causes. The tax burden has been increased .... negligible progress has been made in cutting current spending by the public sector” writes Jeremy Warner, in another brilliant article in the Telegraph.

Coalition economic policy, he warns “seems to be an attempt to return us to the way we were in Brown’s Britain”.

Yep. Continuity Brown, I prefer to call it. 

Too many lobby journalists have been simply regurgitating Treasury spin. They’ve taken at face value those briefings about how the government is bringing public borrowing under control. They’ve faithfully recycled all that stuff about it all being the fault of the Eurozone.

The reality is that Treasury policy has changed very little since Gordon Brown was in charge.  We see the same massive accumulation of new debt. The same print-money-and-pray economics. The same misplaced reliance on monetary stimulus to produce growth. The same tendency to blame Europe or the United States for a problem caused by our own lack of competitiveness.

Slowly put surely the penny is starting to drop; if you run the economy the way Gordon Brown did, you end up in the same sort of mess.

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